Four of them are still sitting in harbors right now. Museum ships. You can walk their flight decks, stand where the astronauts landed, touch the catapult tracks. Nobody is lighting the boilers. The Reagan White House actually tried to bring one back. The Navy submitted the cost estimate to Congress. Congress rejected it — not because the number was too high, but because the number kept growing every time an engineer looked at the ship. Before anyone touched a wrench, the floor kept rising. That was 1982. The ship they wanted is now 212 feet underwater off Pensacola. The largest intentional artificial reef in the world. Divers swim through her hangar bay. In this video we cover the class that built twenty-four carriers in four years and outlasted the war by decades. The ship that survived five kamikaze hits and ended up fishing astronauts out of the ocean. The carrier that recovered the Apollo 11 crew — the Airstream trailer where Neil Armstrong was quarantined is still on her hangar deck in Alameda. The one ship in the class that suffered more casualties than any other surviving U.S. warship and never flew again. And the real reason reactivation is impossible today that has nothing to do with the ships themselves. Steam catapult manufacturers no longer exist in the United States. The boilers are no longer made. The workforce that built these ships is gone. In 2026, experts warned that restarting steam catapult production for a brand-new Ford-class carrier would cost tens of millions and take years. An Essex reactivation would need the same supply chain rebuilt from nothing.
Source: What Would It Cost to Reactivate an Essex – Class Carrier?
